New climate-control units for more energy-efficient Electric Vehicles: The innovative Three-Fluids Combined Membrane Contactor

Isetti, Carlo; Nannei, E.; Lazzari, Stefano; Hariri, Saeed; Iliev, Oleg; Prill, Torben

doi:10.1109/ever.2017.7935951

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…However, despite the promising performance of the membrane contactors in dehumidification for air conditioning, these systems usually are too bulky to fit into limited spaces such as vehicles [13]. Isetti et al [14] proposed an innovative compact Three-Fluid Combined Membrane Contactor (3F-CMC) as the core component of a LDC to dehumidify the air in an energy-efficient way. This cycle is integrated with a traditional vapor compression cycle (VCC) to form a climate-control system for serving in electric vehicles (EVs).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigation on the Performance of a Compact Three-Fluid Combined Membrane Contactor for Dehumidification in Electric Vehicles

et al. 2019

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In this paper, the performance of a compact Three-Fluid Combined Membrane Contactor (3F-CMC) is investigated using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), supported and validated with a good agreement by an experimental campaign made on a fully working prototype. This internally-cooled membrane contactor is the core component of a hybrid air conditioning system for electric vehicles (EVs) developed in a successful H2020 project called XERIC. In the adopted numerical approach, the conjugate heat and mass transfer inside the 3F-CMC is described by non-isothermal incompressible flows and vapor transport through a PTFE hydrophobic membrane. The sensitivity of the 3F-CMC performance to air/desiccant flow rates, temperature, humidity, and desiccant concentration is analyzed numerically through the validated CFD codes. According to this study, the moisture removal increases by the inlet humidity ratio, nearly linearly. Under the considered conditions (where the inlet air temperature is 26.2 °C), when the inlet relative humidity (RH) is 75% the moisture removal is about 450% higher than the case RH = 37%, while the absorption effectiveness declines about 45%. Furthermore, this study shows that the amount of absorbed vapor flux rises by increasing the airflow rate; on the other hand, the higher the airflow rate, the lower is the overall absorption efficiency of the 3F-CMC. This investigation gives important suggestions on how to properly operate a 3F-CMC in order to achieve the requested performance, especially in hot and humid climates.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%